


Escorts of the Dead

by Solshine



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Afterlife, Canonical Character Death, Catharsis, Gen, canon-typical vague religiosity, not a fixit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-16
Packaged: 2018-08-07 12:08:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7714387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solshine/pseuds/Solshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's always easier to take a first step to a new place if you're holding the hand of someone who's been there before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Eponine

**Author's Note:**

> Just a collection of my takes on some old tropes that I finished earlier this year. I've found if there's any sin this fandom is most ready to forgive its rehashing of cliches, haha. All second act deaths will get their turn.

There is a lady all in white standing over Marius. Her hair is close-cropped and downy looking, and her eyes are on Éponine. She is smiling. The rain does not fall on her.

Marius kisses Éponine on the forehead, so Éponine assumes she is dead. It is only after she comes to this decision that she realizes her stomach wound and shattered hand no longer pain her.

She sits up. Marius looks right through her. Not that that’s any change, but Éponine finds it does not hurt the same way it used to, his kind face does not command her attention like it did. Instead, she stares at the woman, who still stands unwet by the rain, smiling. She holds out her hand, and Éponine takes it and pulls herself to her feet.

“Madame, are you an angel, then?” she asks. It is not who she expected to be escorting her, but she isn’t about to argue. The woman’s smile quirks to the side and she shakes her head, although in response to the ‘Madame’ or the question, Éponine is not sure. 

“It is good to meet you at last, Éponine,” the woman says.

“Do you know me?” Éponine says. “It’s only that I don’t remember you.” And her memory is no longer the blurred, forgiving thing it once was, one day running into the next. Every moment is perfectly clear, though the memories are no longer heavy on her shoulders.

“You played with my daughter,” says the woman. “When you were both little girls.” Yes, Éponine remembers. Her cheeks burn, and the rain does not cool them. Around her the students are rushing around trying to save the gunpowder.

“We did not often play together,” she mumbles, “though we lived under the same roof.”

The woman shakes her head, smiling. “A sin of the tree, not of the leaf,” she says. “It could as easily have been my Cosette as the innkeeper’s daughter and you sleeping under the table. It could as easily have been you growing up in a fine house and my Cosette on the streets.” She reaches up and strokes a hand gently over Éponine’s tangled hair. Éponine closes her eyes at the soothing touch. “Even if it were only one day, once you played together in the street, and were the same,” says the woman. “You could as easily have been my daughter.”

“I think I would have liked that,” says Éponine. “I think I could have been different, if I were.”

The woman doesn't reply to that, just opens her arms and folds Éponine into an embrace. Éponine buries her face in the white dress. The woman smells of… warm things, open air things Éponine doesn't have a name for, things unlike her mean and dingy life of cities and public houses.

“Will you come with me?” says the woman to the top of Éponine’s head.

“Come with you?” Éponine pulls away enough to look at the woman, then to look at the rain-slick barricade. She looks down at a thin girl still held in Marius’s arms, wept over in a way she knows she would have liked to see, once.

“Yes,” she says. “I will.” 

The woman releases her, and reaches down to take her hand, but Éponine stops before she can be led away from the barricade and the Rue de Villette. “Wait,” she says. Her eyes are pulled to the small boy taking shelter from the rain under a building eave, talking to one of the young men in a low tone, as though he is one of them, as though he is a law student in coat and cravat and not an eight year old grubby with the dirt of the gutter.

“My… brother,” she says, certain now of something of which she had been only distantly aware a few minutes before.

“We will come back for him,” says the woman. “He has the night, yet, and is in good company. But we can wait, if you like.”

They are taking the thin girl out of Marius's arms now and carrying her to the alley behind the cafe. Éponine knows she cannot feel the rain, but it seems cold to her for a moment anyway, and the woman’s hand is warm around hers.

“We will come back for him,” she repeats. The woman smiles, and nods, and leads her through the dark and rainy streets of Paris, into a white light.


	2. The children of the barricade

_When the pup grows--_

Gavroche pushes himself up from the ground, scrubbing at his face with a sleeve.

_When the pup grows--_

He stands, brushes down his trousers, frowns as he looks around. “Up,” he finishes. He looks down at the figure at his feet, bullets spilling from its pockets and open hands.

“Damn,” he says.

He squats and tries to pick up the fallen bullets anyway, but is stopped by a larger hand laid over his own. He looks up to see his sister, Éponine, kneeling beside him.

“It's all right,” she says. “They won't need them.”

“Of course they do,” he argues. “We’re almost out of ammunition and--” He stops himself to look over at the National Guard preparing their final assault, up at the boys preparing their final defense. “Damn,” he sighs.

“You're very brave,” she says. “I'm proud of you.” Gavroche lifts his chin and grins. Then he looks over at the National Guard again and frowns.

“I don't like ‘em thinking they've won,” he says. They haven't won, he knows. Just because the barricades will fall doesn't mean they’ve won, but that's what they'll think it means.

“ I think many understand already that they haven't," says a woman behind Éponine. She wears a white dress and her hair is very short. "And many more will understand someday.”

“Who are you?” Gavroche says.

“A friend,” Éponine answers for the woman. “She's here to take us home.”

Gavroche’s face lights up. Now here was some good news. "We ain't going to the bad place then?” He grins. "I always knew ol’ Thenadier was full of shit.”

His sister grins too. “We have some friends of yours to pick up first, though,” she says. None of them flinch at the sound of cannon fire, or the cannonball that comes whistling past. “Care to do the honors?”

\---

The first one is Bahorel, roused unceremoniously by a kick to the ribs. 

“Come on, you layabouts,” says Gavroche, already moving on to Jehan by the time Bahorel is sitting up to rub his face. “Can't just sleep in the street all day.” He bends down to shake Feuilly roughly by the shoulder. “Come on, we're heroes. We won! It's time to go home.”

“Not what I thought winning would look like,” says Bossuet, being helped to his feet by Bahorel.  
“No,” agrees Jehan. “But we did.”

They find the others upstairs. Joly greets Bossuet with a smile like the sun. Combeferre’s and Courfeyrac’s hands had dropped from each other's, but as soon as their eyes opened their fingers find one anothers’ again unfailingly.

“Good morning!” Gavroche proclaims triumphantly, a proud general surveying his men.

“Good morning!” they all crow back, and laugh.  
Enjolras is slumped against the wall, his head bowed over his chest. He lifts it to see his friends gathered around him, smiling. He smiles back.   
“The battle?” he says. Combeferre claps him on the shoulder.

“France is not free yet, my friend,” he says. "But we have done our part. Others must rise to take our place now.”

Enjolras looks down to where Grantaire had collapsed at his feet, but the other man is already looking up, rubbing his eyes lesslike one awakening and more like one who cannot believe what he sees. Enjolras smiles at him too.

"But," says Grantaire, bewildered. "Didn't we die?”   
The others look at one another, grinning as though the question is funny. Grantaire does not look entertained.

“Yes,” says Feuilly, taking pity on him.

"And now we go to join all the good revolutionaries at that great barricade in the sky," Bahorel declares. “I hope they have lunch ready.” The others all laugh.

“I'm glad we're all together,” says Joly, dimpling, and Bossuet squeezes his hand.

“Where else would we be?” he asks happily.  
“Grantaire, my friend,” says Courfeyrac in alarm. "Why do you weep?”

Grantaire's cheeks are wet, and his breath hitches. It is a startling sight, tears on the cheeks of the iconoclast. But like any shiny veneer, it seems, sarcasm breaks before it bends.

“I did not believe this to be true, this reprieve," he whispers. "I did not believe there was anything waiting for us. I did not believe anything. I am not meant to be here."

Enjolras knows he has accused the man before him of believing in nothing. He can hear his own words in his ears, and they sound tinny and ignorant. He can see his short life, both their short lives, laid behind him, and he had never thought of himself as young and foolish before he died but he feels that way now. He clung to his belief and yet never considered, back then, how bleak disbelief must be, what a burden. How heavy it must be on the shoulders.

Enjolras kneels to where Grantaire still huddles on the floor. "One of the few things I have ever known you to be sure of is that you belong with us,” Enjolras smiles. "Do not change your mind now that I have finally seen my error and believe it as well.”

At that Grantaire does smirk, though tears are still in his eyes. "Oh Apollo," he says, "when have you ever known me to agree with you on anything?”

"Well, come on lads," urges Gavroche impatiently. "My sister is waiting downstairs."

Enjolras offers his hand to Grantaire for the second time that morning. Grantaire swallows, and takes it, and they stand.


	3. Javert

When Javert dies, there is no one.

He comes to still underwater, but above there is a light greater than that of the moon. He is not curious. He does not swim toward it. He just waits, suspended in the cold water.

After a while, though, it is difficult to ignore the fact that his lungs are not burning. The cold does not numb his fingers or his skin. His vision does not dim or blur. The water is not rushing him on like it ought to do in a river. His hair and his coat float around him and he does not drown.

He yet does nothing. Everything is still and quiet for a long time.

Eventually, he gives up and allows himself to surface.

There is nobody waiting on the riverbank. Dawn is approaching. There is no sound, no sign of life—he has never seen Paris so empty. Paris has never been so empty. 

He is on the other side of the river than he began on, Javert notices. He has surfaced, in fact, in front of Notre Dame, he sees as he turns back away from the Seine. It is strange that he did not notice until now that the light he saw even from underwater comes from the open doors of the cathedral. 

Javert does not square his shoulders or take a deep breath. He merely walks through the doors. 

When his eyes adjust to the light—or the light recedes, he cannot quite tell, although it is bright with a goldenness like morning sun inside—he sees that the stern, stone building of columns he finds himself in does not look like Notre Dame at all.

“Well, of course it wouldn’t,” Javert mutters to himself.

“I’ve noticed,” says a small, white-haired man standing in a doorway, “That those for whom this place would look like a church aren’t usually the ones who end up here.” He smiles. “But perhaps that’s not what you meant.”

Javert turns and looks at the man, dressed like a priest despite their surroundings, but says nothing. The river water dripping from his sodden hair and clothes sounds loud on the stone floor. He feels calm, he notices, much calmer than those last few minutes of life had been. He is far from at peace, which is not nearly the same thing, but he is at least calm. The man is still smiling. He has lines etched in his cheeks and around his eyes and bracketing his kind mouth. 

“I am glad,” the old man says, “that you were able to get here on your own. They tried to make it easy. I’m afraid we had no one to send for you.”

Javert watches the man closely. “This is… not Hell,” he says.

“No,” says the man gently. “This is not Hell.”

“Nor Purgatory.”

“Nor Purgatory,” agrees the man. His eyes are sad but he does not step out from the doorway. The hem of Javert's greatcoat drips steadily.

“I have committed self-murder,” Javert points out patiently.

“Yes,” says the man. Javert feels his patience start to slip. 

“I have held to a code rather than a morality,” he says. This is even clearer to him now, without the fog of life clouding his mind. “I have brought my power down against the weak, against the innocent, in the name of a false justice.” He thinks of the prostitute in Montreil-sur-Mer so long ago, thinks of many others. “Or the justice, perhaps, when it was true, was a worthless justice without the mercy that I scorned.” A muscle in his jaw twitches. His clothes keep dripping, into the puddle gathering around his feet. “I have spent decades persecuting a saint.” And there, that's the meat of it, isn't it? That's why he does not approach the doorway in which the man stands.

Now something like amusement flickers briefly across the mouth of the priest, in a way Javert feels is quite inappropriate to the situation. “It had not escaped my notice,” the man says, tone mild.

Javert turns suddenly from the man, from the doorway. He faces the door through which he entered.

“There has been a mistake,” he says briskly. He lifts his chin and joins his hands behind his back. “I will wait here.”

“Inspector--” says the old man.

“I am not an inspector,” says Javert, without turning back to look at him. “I resigned before I killed myself.”

He thinks he hears a quiet exhalation, and then footfalls. And then, he knows without looking, he is alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A ~~Not Very~~ Fun Fact: if you go to the place where Hugo says Javert stood, and look across the river the way he did, you see two things: the Notre Dame cathedral, and the Palais du Justice. God and law.
> 
> "He beheld before him two paths, both equally straight; but he beheld two, and that terrified him..."


	4. Valjean

He is not surprised to see Fantine, as his eyes clear and the weariness finally, finally lifts from his body. The young girl with her, however, is not familiar to him.

"Have we met?" he says. "I do not know you, I think." 

The girl looks to Fantine, who smiles encouragingly. "You saved the life of one whom I loved," The girl says. "I am… I am here as thanks." Her eyes cannot help but slide to Marius, his arms wrapped around a sobbing Cosette, and Valjean thinks he understands. He nods, then looks to the mother of his beloved daughter.

"I am ready, Fantine," he says. She holds out a hand to him and he takes it, though it feels that the strength of his youth has returned to his limbs and does not need her help to stand. She leads him toward the doors of the convent, and how strange it is to know he is going where he need never fear again. 

"Your hair," he begins before he realizes what he is about to say. Fantine smiles at him.

"It is still short," she says, anticipating his words, apparently unoffended. Valjean nods.

"I would have thought…" He pauses.

"I thought the same," Fantine admits. "It did not seem the perfect body but we were promised in the next life. But it was an act of great love for my daughter, when I sold my hair." She reaches out and touches it with the fingertips of the hand that is not tucked in the crook of Valjean's elbow. She smiles gently, to herself, not to Valjean. She casts the briefest look over her shoulder at the crying couple they are leaving behind. "In life, it was a mark of great hardship. But now the hardship is stripped away, and leaves only the love." She smiles for Valjean, now. "It is not a remnant of the past. Is the crown of love, a badge of honor I have been granted permission to wear."

Valjean smiles back at her, warmly. "It looks well on you," he says. 

"It does," says the girl walking next to her. It does.

They reach the doors of the convent, standing open and believing that mean light. Fantine hesitates for just a moment in front of the doors. "There is someone I think you should speak to," Fantine says. It sounds oddly like a warning. He frowns.

"Who is it?" he says. "The bishop?"

"Not the bishop," she says. "He has been waiting. I think he has been waiting for you." She steps forward, and Valjean and the girl go with her, and they are enveloped in white light.

When he can see again, he looks about in surprise.

"The Palais de Justice?" He frowns. "Heaven is the Palais de Justice?"

"Made perfect sense to me," says a familiar voice dryly.

Valjean’s head turns toward the voice. It is Javert, of course it is, standing at parade rest as though waiting to give a report to Monsieur le Maire. His voice, it seems, is the only dry thing about him. He is dripping water into a puddle more like a lake around his feet.

"I should let you speak alone,” says Fantine. She presses a comforting hand to Valjean's arm before releasing it, and smiles. "Follow us whenever you are ready," she says. "Welcome home, Jean Valjean." She takes a step forward, and to the surprise of both Valjean and Javert, leans in to press a soft kiss to the inspector's whiskered cheek. Javert looks at her, startled, but she only smiles at him. She takes the hand of the girl. "Come along, my dear." The girl smiles at Valjean and the two of them pass by Javert, through a doorway, then turn a corner and disappear.

Valjean is left alone with Javert and his puddle. Despite Javert's stance--broken now to press fingertips to his cheek and stare bewildered at the doorway through which Fantine had passed--it is not like those old days at Montreil-sur-Mer. Nor is it like Toulon, or like those handful of terrible moments in Paris. For the very first time, it is just the two of them, Jean Valjean and Javert, two men facing each other as equals.

"Javert," Valjean says, bringing the man's attention back to him. Javert's hand drops to his side. "At last, we see each other plain."

Javert bows his head in greeting. "It is not for you that I wait, Valjean," he says, not accusingly. "I seek a higher authority than yours, hard as that may be to comprehend. And you have already demonstrated your unwillingness to judge me, besides."

"You wait to be judged, then?" Valjean says. It does not surprise him. "You're in the right place," he offers when Javert does not reply. "Judgment is promised before the throne of God."

Javert waves his statement away with a scowl. "To reach the throne of God is to have gotten too far already," he says. "There has been an error. You are wrong, Valjean. I am not in the right place."

Valjean is disturbed to see Javert like this. The man is calm, his back straight and his mouth firm, and Valjean knows better than anyone how difficult it is to convince Javert of anything when he looks like this. And yet for all that, water drips from his coat, his hair, his chin. His hat is missing, too. Fantine said he had been waiting, and yet he looks as though he has only just climbed from the Seine. 

The newspaper article about Javert's demise is clear and terrible in his mind, as is the memory of his horror when he read it. He did not understand why Javert would do this thing. He still does not understand, and seeing Javert calm and implacable and dripping river water is almost more than his heart can take.

"Is this my fault, inspector?" Valjean says quietly.

He does not know what he expects Javert to say. He certainly does not expect a matter-of-fact, unhesitant "Yes.” And having once received that response, he is not expecting a sigh, and a reluctant "No.”

"I cannot confess to understanding," Valjean says. "Which one is it? For the last I saw of you, you were waiting to collect me for arrest as soon as I had secured the boy’s safety. From what I hear, it is almost the last anyone saw of you.”

Javert is prey to a tiny twitch of his face that in someone else might have been a wince. A drop of water falls from his long nose.

“The world had only room for one set of truths," He says. "The irreproachable hand of the law, revealing the corruption of a charismatic recidivist, or the noble saint who broke parole to live in repentance and his heartless, merciless hunter.”

“By which you mean you only understood one of the two," says Valjean mildly. Javert raises his eyebrows. "I know which one you believed when I knew you," Valjean continues. "I suppose presented with the alternative you could not accept it--I am certainly not a noble saint, by the way--but do not paint it as a failing of the world instead. The world has always been large enough for both of us.”

Javert gives a loud laugh, pleased and surprised. "Your morality has grown more biting in death,” he observes. "Are you not meant to be reassuring me of the state of my soul and coaxing me through that doorway?"

"I have received no such instructions," Valjean returns. "And my morality is much as it has always been. As I have said and you have never believed, there is nothing that I blame you for. But if you sense wrong between yourself and God, that is another matter.”

"You would be my advocate before the throne for my argument of Hell, then?" says Javert, perhaps a little mockingly.

"Javert," Valjean says. "What was the real reason?”

"Do you know me so well?" replies the inspector.

Valjean shakes his head. "No. I suppose that was always our problem.” He spreads his hands out in supplication. “So explain it to me.”

"I thought I already had," Javert grumbles. But he sighs. "We have been adversaries so long," he says with a briskness that Valjean might almost think is discomfort. "One of us was always damned. I always thought I knew which it was, but that night…” He presses his lips together for a moment. “I lost my certainty. I did not know the correct answer of the two, but I knew which one I could not bear.” 

The sound of the water dripping from Javert is deafening. "You chose to damn yourself," Valjean finishes. He laughs, a choked sound. "You made the decision for God in case He was inclined to choose wrongly.”

Javert's lips twist into a small smirk. “Hubris well suited to all those who fall from Heaven, I suppose.”

"You are not the Devil, Javert.”

"I have been called so before."

"You are not.” Valjean steps forward suddenly, feet splashing in the puddle, and Javert does not move but by his stillness seems startled all the same. Valjean reaches forward and takes both Javert's gloved, sodden hands in his. "But we are both here now," he points out. "Your hypothesis seems to have been proven incorrect.”

"I cannot account for it," he says stiffly.

"You never could," says Valjean, eyes kind. "My good inspector, Hell is not a prison. Heaven is not a public office. It has nothing to do with merit.”

Javert's jaw is tight, but his tone is quieter than Valjean has ever heard it. "What is it then?"

"A gift," Valjean says. “An invitation.” He curls his fingers around Javert's unyielding hands. "Come in, sir, for you are weary, and the night is cold."

The two men stand and look at each other for a long time. When Javert pulls his hands from Valjean's, Valjean's heart sinks. But Javert only straightens his dry greatcoat, and lifts his chin.

"Lead on," he says. Valjean smiles, and steps past him, to walk through the doorway. He does not need to look over his shoulder to know that Javert, as he always has, is following him.


End file.
